The Admissions (2 page)

4:44 a.m.

Dear Marianne:

Do you know I thought about seeing a therapist? There: I said it. I haven’t told a single soul, not even Gabe. Don’t tell Mom, okay? Seriously.

I was going to go because of
stress
and
sleeplessness
. I thought, what have I got to lose?

I looked into it, and I even wrote down some numbers and checked with my insurance. Which didn’t cover any of it, of course. Though Elpis is ridiculously proud of its insurance. And then I looked at my schedule, and I thought: Ha. When? It turned out that what I had to lose was time I don’t have.

I changed my mind. I didn’t call. I decided you can be my therapist instead. So pardon, in advance, the long emails.

Insomnia is new to me, and on the one hand upsetting, but on the other hand I’m finding that I can really be productive when I put my mind to it. Just before I began this email to you I sent three requests for prices for the booths for the Spring Fling for the elementary school. I got the booth job again, ha, look at that, the first time I typed “booth” it autocorrected to “boob.” (I wish.) I drafted some language for the ad for my next open house and I made a list of all the appointments everyone in the house needs in the next six months: teeth, flu shots, general physicals, etc. Maya needs to see an ophthalmologist even though she’s only seven. Cecily has to go to the orthodontist. I need a mammogram. For healthy people, Marianne, we’re alarmingly busy just taking care of our bodies.

Lucky you, Dr. Sister! You’re hired, and you never even applied for the job.

Two showings in Sausalito went late, but then one in Belvedere was canceled, so Nora arrived home not so long after she’d told the sitter, Maddie, she’d be there. Unfortunately, the showing that was canceled was the only one Nora wanted
not
to be canceled: the Watkins property, which had been a thorn in Nora’s side all summer—a thorn that showed no signs of being removed. The property was priced too high, in Nora’s opinion. But the sellers were firm, and they were difficult, and because they wouldn’t budge Nora knew that all sorts of potential buyers were walking right by and not asking for a showing.

You wouldn’t think, maybe, that two girls with a seventeen-year-old sister would need an after-school babysitter, but not only was Angela supremely busy every day after school but so were her friends and the friends of her friends. They had glee club and band practice and varsity sports. They had recycling club (true story) and Best Buddies (partnering up with kids with disabilities) and French Club or Spanish Club, or sometimes both, and if they weren’t acting in the school plays they were directing them or painting scenery for them or sewing costumes for them. They were preparing for Mock Trial or Speech and Debate; they were applying to be pages at the state General Assembly. They were organizing their twenty-five hours of community service for the National Honor Society. And when they weren’t doing all of that, they were doing homework, homework, homework.

All of the high school students Nora knew were so busy, in fact, that when Nora had gone back to work two years ago she’d had to cast the net far and wide to find someone to shuffle Cecily from school and to her Irish dancing lessons and back home after. Maya, in second grade, traveled along for the rides like a barnacle tucked into a car seat.

Currently Nora shelled out twenty dollars an hour to a USF junior from Wisconsin named Maddie who spent most of the afternoon on her iPhone.

The first thing Nora did when she arrived home was to open the shutters. Maddie had an unfortunate habit of closing them against the afternoon light; she claimed some sort of diagnosed sun sensitivity but Nora suspected (and Cecily confirmed) that the problem was actually that the light made it more difficult to see the screen of her iPhone or iPad. When Nora had time (unlikely) she was going to look into finding Maddie’s replacement, someone who would read with or to Maya, maybe take her through some of the classics Nora had loved when she was young, the irrepressible Anne of
Green Gables
fame. Betsy, Tacy, and Tib. Nora had been an avid reader of the
Betsy-Tacy
books as a child; when Angela was in kindergarten Nora had trotted out her dog-eared, licorice-stained copies and read them to her. Angela easily could have read them to herself, of course, she could practically take herself through Tolstoy at that age, but Nora loved spending all that extra time in Deep Valley, Minnesota, in the early nineteen hundreds. She had neglected to do the same for Cecily, and probably by now Cecily had outgrown the books. But Maya still loved to cuddle, still loved to be read to. Plus she couldn’t read to herself. Don’t think about that now, Nora. Her private rule (never enforced): one worry at a time. Okay, that was impossible. One major worry at a time.

The afternoon light flooded the living room. The shutters were partly a reaction to Nora’s growing up in a house where curtains reigned supreme: in the bathroom, curtains with yellow and pink flowers; in the kitchen, red-and-white-checked country curtains; and in hers and Marianne’s room, curtains depicting little flying fairies—these remained far too long, until Nora went off to the University of Rhode Island at age eighteen. When they’d bought this house Nora had had plantation shutters installed, not because she liked them—though in fact she did—but because they were neutral and expensive and generally acceptable and because Nora, as much as she professed not to be, was just as influenced as the next guy by that ultimate driver, that unseen hand: resale value.

“Mom!” said Cecily, propelling herself toward Nora and then wrapping her skinny arms around Nora’s waist. Cecily ate and ate, she ate everything in sight, and still she retained the half-starved look of an old-fashioned orphan: pointy elbows, hollow cheekbones. She didn’t care. She did a bit where she sucked her stomach in as far as it would go and put each and every rib on display, offering them for counting. (“Wait until she hits puberty,” said Angela darkly. “I used to be skinny too.” Angela, at 108 pounds, barely registered on the digital precision pet scale Nora had purchased from Frontgate when Frankie, their beloved, deceased Newfoundland, had flirted with an overeating problem.)

“Where’s Maya?” asked Nora.

“Playdate,” said Maddie. “Penelope’s. I texted you.”

“Right.” For a fraction of an instant Nora allowed herself to plant her face in Cecily’s hair, which smelled like strawberry shampoo, and to drink in her unadulterated affection.

“Ava broke her toe and can’t dance and my hard shoes got too small over the summer and I need new ones
before
the
feis,
which means they won’t be broken in but look I got that last part of my solo
perfectly,
you have to see this, I don’t have any music but just watch.”

Maddie roused herself from the couch, more slowly than Nora thought was necessary for a twenty-year-old. Nora tried not to think about how much she was paying Maddie. She tried not to think about the fact that the Watkins listing was due to expire in November and that, when it did, Mr. and Mrs. Watkins were going to take the home off the market for the holiday season and list it in the new year with a different agency. (Arthur Sutton, her boss, did not know this, and it was Nora’s mission in life to sell the home before he found out.) She tried not to think about the fact that she didn’t have ingredients for dinner, and the fact that she should have picked Maya up at Penelope’s on the way home, and she tried not to think about the three loads of laundry waiting for her, which she had forgotten to mention to Maddie and which, if she had, Maddie would have ignored anyway.

For now, she and Maddie stood in solidarity, watching Cecily dance. Cecily was a gorgeous dancer, absolutely gorgeous, and Nora took a moment to appreciate this, that this child who had come from her, from Nora (a woman who possessed no musicality, no dance talent, a woman who could not even learn the Electric Slide properly when it was being played at everyone’s weddings), had become this magnificent creature with long, lean leg muscles and a smile that could break your heart. Nora allowed herself to be transported to the Old Country, home of her ancestors; she imagined standing on a hilltop one hundred years ago or in a darkened pub on a Sunday afternoon, where she sipped from a pint of stout while a musical trio in the corner struck up a tune.

“Beautiful, Cecily,” she said, when Cecily had finished dancing and given the requisite toe-point-out bow, and that smile, that
smile
that the judges ate right up. Very few girls smiled at the Irish dance competitions. They were too busy girding themselves against vomiting onstage, a phenomenon of nerves that was, unfortunately, more common than you might think. “I would totally give you a first,” said Nora. Then, in a poor imitation of Cecily’s dance instructor, Seamus O’Malley, she offered up an Irish-accented “Well done, lass.” Cecily rolled her eyes, but in a good-natured way that Nora appreciated. Nora knew, having been through it once before, that the good-naturedness departed around age twelve or thirteen and returned—when? She didn’t know. She hadn’t found out yet. Nora paused. Deep breath. “Where’s Her Majesty?” she asked.

Cecily shrugged. “Not home from cross-country practice yet, I guess. Haven’t seen her.”

Just then the front door opened to reveal a sweat-soaked girl wearing running shorts and a crimson T-shirt that said HARVARD across it in proud silver letters. Angela had her sights set on her father’s alma mater, and had fixed them there long ago and never wavered. (Though it was hard to say, sometimes, if Angela had set them there or if Gabe had set them there for her.)

Angela must have run home, her chest was still heaving, though how she did that with the backpack Nora didn’t know. She didn’t even want to know. Maybe someone had dropped her off, another mother, a nonworking mother who had time to attend not only all of the meets but all of the practices as well.

“Hey,” Angela said, surveying the scene, smiling, but only, if you looked closely, with her mouth. Not her eyes. She let her gaze roam over the room, over Cecily, over Maddie, settling finally on her mother. “I am absolutely starving,” she said. “And I have hours of homework.”

Nora Hawthorne took a deep breath, opened her arms, and folded her oldest daughter into them. Angela: her angel, for so many years the one and only. This was the girl who had frantically sucked her own fingers to get herself to sleep, necessitating early and expensive intervention by one of Marin’s most reputable orthodontists. This was the girl who read a chapter book long before she turned four and spoke an entire sentence in perfectly accented Spanish at age two. This was the girl who had, as a kindergartner, accompanied her father on a trip to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they had taken in the Harvard–Yale game on a crisp November afternoon, and who had allowed herself to be photographed wearing every sort of crimson paraphernalia that money could buy and some that it couldn’t. The photograph, enlarged, framed, now hung over the desk in Gabe’s home office, a sanctum rarely used for its stated purpose but nevertheless extravagantly decorated with all manner of collegiate memorabilia.

“Mom,”
said Angela. She tried to pull back from Nora but Nora wouldn’t allow it; she didn’t care if Angela was sweating or unwilling. She was Nora’s for only a little while longer. Nora hugged the heck out of her anyway.

Twelve months from now Angela would be gone from them, launched into the particulars of her almost-adult life, dependent on her parents to buttress her bank account and occasionally her emotions, but really, truly, for all intents and purposes,
gone.

“Mom,” said Angela again. “Let me go. Please? Mom?” But Nora felt her lean in before she pushed away, and all through that fall (was
fateful
too strong a word to describe it?) she held on to that fraction of a second, that clue that Angela was still a part of them.

“Mom. I’m all sweaty. I’m gross.”

Maddie had gone back to tapping on the screen of her iPhone, almost as though the person who handed her a sizable check each week wasn’t in the same room. Cecily was performing a set of elaborate stretching exercises that involved extending her leg over the couch, lowering it, then lifting it again. Nora’s phone buzzed: probably Penelope’s mother, wondering when Nora might be by to fetch Maya.

Nora released her oldest daughter. Earlier that week she had written seven important words on Angela’s wall calendar:
deadline for all early-action application materials.
November first.

Here it was. It had arrived. The most important period of Angela Hawthorne’s young life was beginning. Brace yourself, thought Nora. Batten down the hatches. Here we go.

Gabe was early to the appointment with the college counselor, which was fine, except he had taken a half day off for this so in truth it really wasn’t fine for him to have to wait—things at Elpis were busy busy, always busy, the wheels of industry and commerce turning.

It was harder to get an appointment with the college counselor than it was to get a reservation at the French Laundry, and so Nora had sent him several emails and a text the day before reminding him about it. Two p.m., she said. We need to be there together, to support Angela. Gabe checked in at the main office, where a young woman with dramatic red highlights in her hair pointed toward a closed door with a light wooden bench outside of it. “Wait there,” she said. “Ms. Vogel will be with you shortly.” In fact he didn’t consider this appointment to be necessary anyway; this was Nora’s doing. Gabe did not, as they say, have a dog in this fight. Or, more accurately, he had only one dog, and he didn’t consider it a fight. Angela was going to Harvard. Ergo, the meeting with the college counselor was a formality.

He waited five minutes, then ten. Three minutes to two now. How unlike Nora to be late for something like this. He checked his phone and there it was: a text, lacking in punctuation (he blamed Siri) but not clarity:
Meet without me have to show the watkins house just came up sorry

The Watkins house, all four bedrooms and six and a half bathrooms of it. Breathtaking views of the Golden Gate Bridge. Every freaking listing in Belvedere offered breathtaking views of the bridge; if Realtor.com was to be believed, none of the town’s two thousand citizens had taken a full breath in decades. Every home in Belvedere also had more bathrooms than it had bedrooms, which seemed to be a phenomenon of the very wealthy, one that Nora couldn’t explain away, though Gabe had asked. This listing was not the most expensive in Belvedere, but it was the biggest property that Sutton and Wainwright had been offered this year, and the listing had gone to Nora. A very big deal. Four bedrooms on a quarter-acre lot. (
“Seriously?”
said Gabe, who, though he now considered himself a Californian, and though he loved it here in his adopted state, could still not believe what your money did not get you. The whole state of Wyoming, where Gabe had grown up, would probably sell for less than eight million dollars. “Eight
million
?” And Nora had said, “Eight point eight. But it’s a
Cooper Sudecki.
” This last said quietly, reverently, as though no elaboration were needed.)

Once, before kids, they had had fantastic sex on the kitchen floor of Nora’s first listing, a two-bedroom condo in Sausalito. The home was unoccupied—in general, not just at the time, though that too, of course—which made the act seem a little more acceptable, but Nora freaked out after: What if there were security cameras? What if she lost her job? Her license? What if she disappointed the unflappable, undisappointable Arthur Sutton, who doted so thoroughly on Nora?

A murmuring at the office desk, and here, at last, came Angela. She sat down beside Gabe and released an enormous backpack from her shoulders. (Why so big? Hadn’t everything gone digital?) Her eyes were the same blue as Nora’s, though bigger, rounder.

“Hey,” she said. “Hi, Daddy.”

Angela looked tired. “You okay, sweetie?”

“Of course,” she said. Angela and Maya had inherited from Nora the blondish-red hair, the Irish skin, while Cecily, the Irish dancer, looked more like a Syrian refugee—a throwback, maybe, to some Native American blood Gabe’s family had never acknowledged, some kind of skip-a-few-generations gene pool situation. He noted that Angela’s nails were bitten to the quick—a new habit? He couldn’t say—and that they were nonetheless painted a deep purplish black. Angela said, “Where’s Mom?” and went at one of the fingernails, though what was left to chew Gabe couldn’t imagine.

Seventeen years old, and still Angela called him Daddy. He loved that, didn’t want it ever to change. He wanted all of his girls to call him Daddy forever. He wanted Angela to call him Daddy when he walked her down the aisle (many years hence, he hoped) and he wanted her to call him Daddy when she introduced him to his first grandchild.

He held up his phone. “Just got a text. She has to show the Watkins house.”

Angela—if this was possible—opened her eyes even wider than she already had. Those eyes, so big and round that each was like an individual moon set into her face, considered his. “Yeah? That’s great. Let’s hope these people are The Ones.” She knew—as everyone but Arthur Sutton knew—that the Watkins listing was going to expire at the end of November. Five percent of $8.8 million, $440,000. Then, divide that by two, half to the buyers’ realtor and half to Sutton and Wainwright, that was $220,000. Even after Arthur Sutton had taken his cut (and Gabe was never quite sure about what that cut was), it would be a considerable sum for the Hawthornes, coming at just the right time, before the first tuition payments came due. “Still,” continued Angela, “I wish she could be here. She set this whole thing up. I met with the counselor last year. And I’m missing AP English. We’re talking about our college application essays.”

Gabe grew up on a real working ranch outside of Laramie, where the sky was obscenely big and the closest McDonald’s was forty-five minutes away. When he applied to college his personal essay was about birthing a stillborn calf in the middle of a blizzard. True story! It was harrowing, and when he stood next to Nora in the delivery room for the births of all three of their daughters he couldn’t shake certain images from his mind: the blood, the way the mother cow’s eyes rolled back in their sockets, the smell of birth and death “intermingling in the black of a midwinter’s night,” the way he’d written it in the essay. He’d always had a way with words: this helped him enormously in his job at Elpis. He also had a way with people.

He wondered what Angela was going to write about. Had he and Nora done a disservice by not putting her in front of a childbearing cow? He thought they’d given her every advantage, starting with the early days at Little Nugget Montessori. Who was the kid she’d pushed from the top of the slide? Timothy Maloney. (
We understand that you and the Maloney family have come to a suitable agreement regarding Timothy’s medical bills, and we are ready to move forward and enjoy the rest of an enriching year here at Little Nugget,
said the letter home. “I just wanted to be
first,
” a tearful Angela had said.) Then there were the swimming lessons, the flute, the dancing, the skiing, the running, French, Italian. But they’d forgotten about the cow. Nobody in his family lived anywhere near a ranch now, his parents had both passed and his two brothers lived in Vancouver and South Carolina, of all places. Everyone was craving water after years of being landlocked. “The essay!” he said. “That’s the best part of the application. What are you thinking about—”

Just then the door beside them opened, and out stepped a mop-haired boy followed by his parents; the man was an older, wearier, tidier version of the son, and the woman was an even wearier version of the man. The tension released from the office was thick thick thick; Gabe would have whispered to Angela that you could practically cut it with a knife, but he knew that was a cliché, and he knew that clichés were
verboten
at Oakville High, especially in the top fifth of the class.

“That’s Jacob Boyd,” whispered Angela as the backs of the three disappeared around the corner. “He’s, like, fifteenth. Not bad. He’ll probably go somewhere like Occidental.”

Gabe knew that if Nora were there she’d say something cheery and accepting about Jacob Boyd, like, “Occidental is a wonderful school!”

But Nora was not there, she was showing the $8.8 million in Belvedere, and anyway, hard-to-schedule Ms. Vogel was waiting for them. She had a deeply tanned, deeply wrinkled face and wiry gray hair sticking out all over and she wore a sweater that was almost certainly hand-knit. She shook Gabe’s hand with a grip that was limper than Gabe would have liked and said, “Come in, both of you. Mr. Hawthorne. Angela. My next appointment is at two twenty and I know we’ve got a lot of ground to cover here. Mr. Hawthorne? You look a little deer-in-the-headlights. Please don’t worry. I haven’t bitten any parents since second semester of last year.”